Creating Compelling Ads & Landing Pages

Compelling your visitors to click through to your website can be a challenge. The speakers in this session intend to tackle the issue and address what you can do to improve your ads and landing pages for maximum effectiveness on any search engine marketing campaign you may undertake.

Misty Locke, from Range Online Media was up first to discuss her presentation. She is going to start with the creative on site and in the ads. There are 6 key reminder she recommends

Who are you targeting? Know you audience!

Conversion can vary dramatically for the same keyword depending on the landing pages

Landing pages should directly correlate to keyword and placement

Convenience of the online shopper

Take a deep breath – Use 203 click rule. For every click it takes the visitor, you loose 30% of your business

Misty goes on to explain that you need to understand how it all works before you can use it. Determine the most relevant search terms. What do you do with them next? Consider the following:

Is the search term relevant to the page?
Does your page mention your desired search term in the content?
Is this a product search or a category search? If it’s a product, send them to a product!

There are many key things to consider when creating a good landing page. Remember to evoke emotion to create the sale. Misty talks pretty fast, so I am trying to catch everything. She quickly goes into a next example, and gives the example of the Wyndham Miami Airport Hotel. They went about by contacting the user to see what they were looking for. What they figured out was that they needed to target the customer. You don’t have a dream getaway at an airport hotel. They realized this, and reworded the description to reflect benefits, such as cheap rates, internet access, near the airport, etc..

Also, be sure to focus on the user. There are check point you should consider regarding the title of your landing page. Add the keyword in the title, add “official site” when relevant. For the description be sure to add a call to action, including benefit statements.
There is a interesting things that happens with the example she gave. Apparently cross selling is very successful. I have heard this on multiple occasions as well. Basically what was happening was those people that were searching for something like “Wyndham Puerto Rico Hotel” where actually booking a room in say a Chicago hotel. Why this happens? Not sure, but its effective to cross sell on the same page.

Misty is concluding with some final points. She recommend considering your target audience, and that conversions can vary dramatically. Build trust, and reduce the amount of clicks the visitor has to take.

Joe Agliozzo, from BetterPPC, was up and he asks the crowd how often they test there copy? He says that 2 seconds is the time that takes a searcher to click on something in the search results. In 2 seconds you need to stand out. Example, try to get terms bolded in your ads. You can also add credibility words to your ads. Example: guaranteed, lowest price.

Interrupters are something you should consider. He gives the example of an Apple ads, with a boxer that has nothing to do with computers, but it works. Joe goes on to give an example of his client Team America. They added wild card {KeyWord: Team America} to the ads and some compelling reasons to get to click, such as emphasizing from parts of the movie. He goes into a good number of examples of clients where improvements were made. He recommends to vary your ad copy a lot. Joe says that his company offers some software to help you test this at www.betterppc.com. I would like to check out what software his company is offering.

Matt Spiegel, from Resolution Media was up to present next. He goes into a brief company history and information about his background. He starts the presentation with an example client, Socrates who offers information about obtaining various documents and lease agreements. His example relates to real estate keywords, specificially real estate lease agreements. He explains that to improve the click through rates was to remove the cost of the product from the ad. They got more clicks when removing the price. They worked with the click on both the ads and the landing pages.

Landing pages are important, you need to consider where you are sending the visitor and if there are better pages for which could offer them more. Things he recommends make a good landing page. Highlight hot or good products at the top. Change some of the copy so that it speaks to the consumer, say “this is why you need the product”. They made sure the copy express a call to action and communicated with the consumer.

He goes on to give an example from a company that marketed to golf shop pros. They created a merchandising strategy to target these people. They created a holiday sale landing page, and also looked at the purchase pattern. He says its more than the landing page, and you can consider the purchase pattern several levels deep into the site.

He ends with some recommendations. Different copy recommendations for different situations. Landing page must deliver on promise of title and description.

Very good and helpful session, however it was quite rushed in my opinion. Slow down with the examples and explanations.

Question and Answer from the audience.
Q: How do you translate you Google test results over to Overture. Second, how do you test on Overture?

A: Overture has editorial policies, and its easy to test on Google, and have ads rotate evenly. From what many of our customers tell us that what works on Google also workings on Overture. You can also try to use different tracking url’s to test the various engines.

Q: We don’t do direct sales, and do lead generation? How do we test that?
A: Have a specific landing page per page or product, and work with the leads and see how many of those have converted to sale. Measure it by a cost per lead basis. Try a specific phone number, gather leads online with a tracking url. Its hard to track this, so no exact answer.